There has been a drive by increasingly technically savvy business teams to perform self-service analysis on the business information that they intimately know in terms of element relationships and business rules. At the same time these business teams do not want to involve their IT counterparts in all steps of the analysis. The primary reason for this drive is simply the overhead required in terms of time and resources to involve IT in generating critical information that drive business decisions. If business teams could get their hands on tools that allow them pull information in from the data repositories and allow them to do the analysis they need fast and in an easy, non-technically daunting manner, the value of such tools is easily bought by business sponsors. Of course, in no way does this imply that IT is redundant, IT has to be involved in the enterprise reporting level and to maintain the infrastructure that supports the so-called local departmental analytics, and they will always be brought into picture when a certain local analysis is so critical that it needed to be “productionalized” and deployed to a larger audience.
Unfortunately, thus far such “magic” self-service tools that business teams could master and use locally did not exist, or if they did they were either in spreadsheet formats with restricted analysis capabilities, or embedded inside of bigger complex software suites and therefore were cost prohibitive. The fast response times from such local applications where the business user wanted results rather than waiting for response prompts from the reporting applications were absent as well.
CIOs are faced with the dilemma of technology-business alignment – they have to ensure that the current technology that has been implemented in their organizations aligns with the business objectives. The alignment between business strategic objectives and the technology strategies is crucial to ensure the success of technology projects currently in progress or those that are being planned.
Early buy-in from the business owners for technology projects is vital to ensure continued support for those projects in the later phases. The key to ensure an early buy-in is to clearly, distinctly and explicitly align technology strategy with the business strategy. The stress on “clear” and “explicit” means that every single person working on the technology project, whether a project manager, a developer or a tester, should be able to clearly articulate in simple terms why their current project has been undertaken, and which business strategic objectives it meets.
The absence of such clear pervasive understanding of the objectives of technology project is often the root cause of the apparent ad-hoc decisions that mare made throughout the project – from high level architecture to the most granular code design and construct.
Aligning the technical objectives with business strategies is not as easy as it sounds. It has to start from the very top, i.e. at the level of a CIO or equivalent. Organizationally, there is a much better chance of ensuring success of a technology project if the business sponsor organizationally “owns” the project. The driver than automatically becomes the business side of the house, ensuring that the functional objectives and the technical scopes are aligned.
